I nodded.
He jerked his head and looked away. “I thought it was her.”
I said, “Do you think we can do this? I think we can do this.”
“Look, you go and have your dinner tomorrow night, which if you want to talk about crazy, that is a little bit crazy. But be careful. I love Sarah, and I miss Sarah, but remember they call it a past for a reason. And this weekend we will have dinner at my home. And we will have Teri’s chili, and we will have a beer, and we will knock our heads together until we figure out how we get this place shipshape. We are all in a funk, my friend. And soon I will have a son, or a daughter, either one would be fine with me, really, either one, as long as the baby is healthy, I promise, to put all the way through preschool. And then to college. And we will do what everyone else in the world is doing and that is having meals together and making a living and having a drink together and watching our little ones get grown up, and getting ready to retire so we can die a little bit happy, okay? What do you think?”
“I like it.”
“A good plan?”
“Good plan,” I said. “And what’s the mission today?”
“I will take care of the front, if you do the inventory.”
“No problem.”
“This is not a small job. The storeroom is like a jungle. You’ll be in there all day long.”
Again with the buzzing at my waist, I hoped it was Sarah.
Dad 10:20.
I showed Amad the phone, and said, “Nothing excites me more right now than the idea of taking our inventory.”
“Then we are halfway there.” He put up his hands and went inside.
“Dad,” I said.
“You called me before,” he said.
“Yeah. And then you called me back.”
“What?”
“You called me back.”
He said, “Don’t treat me like I’m crazy. You called me.”
“Okay,” I said. “Are you all right?”
“What?”
“I said are you all right?”
He coughed. “Your mother,” he said. “She’s here.”
And then he hung up the phone.
Not long after Mom first got sick, I was maybe thirteen, Dad pulled me aside in the backyard. It was late morning. He asked me if we could talk, seriously, man to man. I nodded my head. The maples were in my peripheral vision, and some sort of family get-together was going on in the yard behind ours. I didn’t recognize anyone there as a neighbor.
He said, “I’ve been praying for your mother. Have you been praying for your mother?”
We sat outside on the back porch steps. I was catching lightning bugs and letting them free. The day before I’d caught one and crushed it with my foot on the concrete and watched it glow briefly like the electric smear of a highlighter. And then I watched that yellow light dim and die out. I felt terrible, and guilty, and I asked for God’s forgiveness.
I said, “Yeah, I pray for Mom.”
“Good,” he said. “It’s working. And I’m going to tell you something that you can’t tell anyone. Okay?”
I nodded my head: Yeah, okay.
He said, “I think our Heavenly Father is testing us. I think somewhere inside this horrible woe is a test, a reward. It’s our job to find it. And I believe my good son has the gift of communion with our Heavenly Father.”
I said nothing.
He said, “Don’t you?”
I probably nodded.
He said, “I want you to commune with our Heavenly Father. Ask for his blessing on your mother, on this family, and I think even as much as we do this we still aren’t doing enough. I want to reach him. I want to reach out to him. Will you make a sacrifice with me?”
This made me uncomfortable.
“Nothing would make me prouder,” he said, “than to have my son beside me while I make a sacrifice. A burnt offering of thanks, a visible sign. Will you help me?”
I nodded.
I admit I was interested. What kid wouldn’t be? I had visions of him buying a live chicken or a goat. From where? Maybe a large, live fish from the market. We went to the store to get groceries for dinner, and get charcoal, and Dad filled up a bag with fruits and vegetables. I saw the fish tanks all along the wall. I walked over to them, and heard Dad, behind me, raising his voice. I turned around. He was making a small scene with the produce woman.
“What kind of a produce section doesn’t have pumpkins?” He must’ve wanted them for their dramatic size.
“But they’re not in season,” she said.
He asked her what the most expensive kind of produce was. The most precious. And she shrugged, pointing to a box of dried cherries, and Dad said, “Are those really considered produce?”
“They’re in the aisle,” she said, “so yeah. Ten dollars a box, which is a whole lot more per pound.”
That first cancer was in Mom’s left breast and I remembered how they cut out as much as they could without removing the breast entirely. Oncology has come a long way. I don’t think Mom or the doctors would think twice about removing it now. She went through radiation therapy, and chemo, and the doctors said fatigue should be expected, but it would go away, eventually. Except she just got more tired. Mom had been working as a secretary for a large toy manufacturer back then (now out of business), and so the insurance was good. So were the people she worked with. They visited her in the hospital, and then they visited her at home, and they called her on weekdays while she lay in bed watching Donahue. Her boss was a friendly lady, I don’t remember her name. I do remember Dad being rude to her, to all of them, and making a comment about the flowers they brought, that flowers always die and who brings flowers to a hospital? Who doesn’t bring flowers to a hospital? Dad always seemed ill equipped for the world, or maybe he just lacked enough experience with it.
When Mom first found out she was shocked, yes, I think, definitely, reluctantly shocked and sort of confused. Dad was certainly confused. Baffled. Cancer was not in the plan. How does a family that gives itself all the way to God fall prey? But Mom turned stoic pretty quickly. She found a neutral and practical state of mind that played a good healthy balance to Dad’s manic spirit and bent for abstraction. She would deal with this, and stare it right down. Therapy sessions were regular, and sometimes I went along. We took the bus when Dad was working. Mom didn’t drive. I heard the doctor talk to Mom about “fractional kills,” about the process of cancer therapy and the attempt to kill off the cancer, cell by cell, but that meant small good parts of her got killed, too. I tried to imagine what good parts of her, exactly, were getting killed, and because I couldn’t quite imagine what a real adult woman’s breast looked like (especially my mother’s), I thought of her breast as maybe like a pear or some other piece of fruit, because that’s what it looked like under a sweater or a dress or a shirt. A thin slice of that fruit got cut off at the hospital, every time.
She got depressed, and she prayed. Members of our congregation often visited the hospital and then the house, after she came home, and we all said prayers there together. Sometimes Dad would lead us in prayer, but then at other times some thoughtful visitor who clearly meant well would say something like “God works in mysterious ways,” and Dad would get angry. Mom’s cancer wasn’t a mystery. It couldn’t be. Impossible. To Dad it was absolutely obvious—she had done nothing wrong, probably never a wrong thing in her life, and so this couldn’t be punishment. The only possibility was reward. Somehow, Mom’s getting sick was a reward, a divinely inspired reward, and one that required a deep and considered interpretation lest we think otherwise, because to think otherwise would suggest a God with no plan at all, or at least one not so committed to protecting his devoted.
I only knew that something invisible was killing my mom, and that when I thought hard enough about it I found myself not wanting to talk about that thing at all. Or about anything. I for sure didn’t want to talk from a pulpit. Yet Mom’s sickness brought the elder brothers even closer.
Also, Mom slept a lot. I knew that, too.
She wanted to sleep, I think, because sleep made the hours pass along unfelt, and she could dream. She said she dreamed of paradise and Heaven. And the rest of 1980 seemed to pass like all of us were sleeping. I was in the throes of such adolescent intensities, some of which I can hardly now recall, and Dad was working nonstop and praying nonstop, blaming the world and life itself for Mom’s misfortune—I guess, in a way, he was right—and Mom, a fast-graying and emaciating mamma bear in long hibernation, was always upstairs, losing more hair by the day. Dad slept mostly on the couch downstairs in the living room. Everything had changed. He was working two jobs, selling ad space in a local paper by day and working nights at a convenience store in Astoria. I was going to school, and coming straight home to sit with Mom, or to help Mom to the doctor, or do anything at all Mom needed. So church and Bible study fell off a bit to the wayside. But only for a little while because, this was about spring of 1981, the doctors said the chemo was finally working. They couldn’t say how much exactly, but it was working.
Yet Mom was now more tired than ever. Dad was convinced we simply weren’t doing enough.
Hence the backyard sacrifice.
We bought the dried cherries, and lots of other stuff, and we went home, and before making hamburgers on the backyard grill, the spring light still high in the sky and looking more like morning than night, Dad piled his produce on the metal grill grates. The box of cherries first, and everything else tumbled and piled on top. He squirted the stack with lighter fluid, and told me to not be afraid. He lit it. And the fire burned high and fast while he said a prayer out loud. Not as dramatic as a bloodletting, but it would do. It had to. The air smelled of sugars and charred fibrous vegetable skins and the cardboard box and brown paper bag it had all been brought home in. Dad raised his arms and his hands, and threw back his head in complete supplication, a desperate and sincere plea: Lord, please listen to my heart. His eyes were closed. But mine were open, because I couldn’t look away from what I suddenly realized was a pretty girl in the backyard right behind ours. She was tossing her head back and forth to music I couldn’t quite make out, coming from a boom box on the back porch. This was Bhanu. And I was changed. The answer to our prayers, and Dad was missing it.
Bhanu was Bangladeshi, and she and her family had moved in just days before. I didn’t even know the family living there previously had left. There had been no children in that house, only an older Irish couple and the husband’s aging parents. I didn’t know their names. Bhanu became the only thing that could take my mind from Mom, and from Issy and the constant question of where he was. Things no longer made sense, and I could think of nothing but that. Plus, thinking of Issy made me not think of how sick Mom was. Bhanu changed all that. She was alive, and lovely, and from the very moment we met I would think of little else but her.
She saw our fire, Dad and me standing beside it.
Then Dad fell to his knees, and he tried to get me to fall down, too.
She approached the fence. She waved.
But I did not wave back.
Why not? Was I embarrassed? Absolutely. I was seeing myself and my father through someone else’s eyes, and it was strange. We were strange. I knew this now. Then again, I was coming to know it more and more with every passing day in school, because strangeness can pass in grammar school, in fifth grade and sixth grade—but in junior high and high school? Not a chance. And they’re made for that reason. Junior high and high school train a child and make him understand, follow the general social contract, et cetera. Strangeness of any kind, any deviance at all, will be amplified and shouted from the gymnasium rooftop and blared over the loudspeaker system. I was the Jesus Freak, the Preacher Kid, and this was the case because Havi—who I never spoke a word to ever again, and truly and shamefully wished cruel things upon throughout my teenage years—was in my school. He had nothing to do with the Brothers in the Lord anymore, and had decided the best way to make room for his hallway swagger was to tell everyone in the school who would listen, including teachers, deans, and the janitorial staff, that I was “Jesus crazy,” and that I gave a sermon saying the world was going to end soon and that his best friend, Issy, would die even sooner. And remember that kid who disappeared, he would say? That was my best friend. Josiah’s a freak.
At lunch, there were safety tables for all, every tribe and stripe. But not for the Jesus freaks. I became even more of a loner. It would be a long time before I understood how addictive and dangerous sadness can become, but at the time I reveled. My mother was ill, my father was a mystery to me, and I could not stop thinking about the unexplainable loss of my friend.
Regardless. I should have waved to Bhanu. I should have, because that one simple wave could have saved me years of trouble, of all that time trailing her like a sick dog on a very long leash. I followed her at school. I followed her in the neighborhood. I threw balls and Frisbees over the fence into her yard just to have a reason for climbing and standing on possibly the same spot where she had once stood. And I hoped to see into her window. I once braved walking right up to their house. I looked into a kitchen window just as her mother stuck out her head to hang a sheet from a clothesline. She didn’t see me. I dove behind a small shed and froze for what seemed like hours. Until she shouted out to Bhanu to please go out back and roll up the water hose like she’d been asked to. I checked to see if she was looking—she’d ducked back inside—and I jumped the gate into their next-door neighbor’s yard and ran for my life. I also once stood behind her at a corner deli, holding a small grape drink and praying she would not say hello to me. She bought a pack of black licorice—the only thing I found unattractive about her, which in itself made the licorice attractive, because clearly I was wrong—and an orange juice. She paid, and she turned and said: “Hi, Josie.” Josie? I’d never heard the name before, and now I wanted to wear it like a suit of armor. After she shook her head, she said, “You’re so weird.” She left the store, and I stood there looking into the space she had just taken up, at the air itself, the dust in the air, like a cutout shape of her, until the woman behind the counter said, “You buy.” Later, I bought black licorice and, just as I had expected, thought it horribly bad. One week after that, I bought black licorice and orange juice. I ate them together, in my mouth at the very same time, like two kinds of medicine at once; it was disgusting. But I finished it. I was in love.
Or what felt like love. Who knows what it is when you’re young? I mean, real love has a long-burning fuse, but those first flares burn like hell. And they hurt, and snuff out all too soon. She would have nothing to do with me at all, I assumed. For years. But it didn’t really matter. Because everything else fell away. School. Bullies. Issy. Even cancer. Love is a lot like faith, because you surrender yourself, fully, and with no expectations. There is hope, yes, but never expectation.
It was years before I finally opened my mouth and said hello back. This was in high school, and I found her smoking in the lower stairwells with the Goth girls and the metal girls, all lips painted black but hers. Christian Death and Slayer band patches on their denim jackets and backpacks. I was entranced. They all seemed so evil and romantic. I was fifteen.
Inspired, I said: “Hello.”
She started laughing, and said, “Took you so long. He lives on my block!” she said to the girls. They could barely stop giggling.
One of the girls high-fived her, and said, “Isn’t he that freak? Aren’t you, like, a preacher?”
Another girl said, “No, he’s the one with the mother. His mother has, like, cancer.”
Bhanu said: “Shut up.”
I sat with her at lunch that day. And we talked. This may have been the first time I actually talked with someone at lunch, or at least talked without worrying for my life, that some metalhead, or some jock, or some other misanthrope in hopes of scoring points with normals would trip me on the way to my table, or hit me with an empty milk carton, or ask me what I was looki
ng at. It was glorious. In the fast-working ecosystem that is high school, here I was, a boy sitting with girl, a pretty girl, and having lunch. I wasn’t such a freak after all. Things would get better. We walked home that day, and she said Goth was stupid, but Slayer was cool, and the girls were mostly smart and she liked them okay. We shared from a 25-cent bag of potato chips, and I tried to place her particular and lovely smell—and then one day, a long time later, this was years and years later, I was offered a coconut milk to drink, and I smelled it, and time caught me up like a trap. Here was Bhanu.
A few weeks on, my father spotted us walking home from school. He later asked me if I’d made a proper witness for the Lord. Did I tell her what I believed, and say why she should believe it, too? I must’ve betrayed myself and instead showed how it had never occurred to me once, not once, and I expected him to show some disappointment in me at the very least, say I should be ashamed, et cetera—but, surprise: grinning, my father said, “My little man is in love. Promise you won’t tell your mother. Enough on her plate as it is.”
He was all of a sudden full of surprises.
That same year, I’m guessing this was 1983, when there were commercials everywhere for what was being billed as a “Historic Television Event.” A made-for-TV movie called The Day After, coming soon, and it would air on a Sunday. A Sunday! American audiences would finally see what a real Armageddon will look like—a nuclear one, yes, and man-made, but who says God’s above using such weapons? Why waste all that effort? There were stockpiles.
The whole congregation was in a tizzy.
We talked about it at home, over dinner, in the morning, for weeks before the movie ever started. What do you think it will look like? Do you think this is a sign of the times? Do you think the actors are aware that God is actually watching? And how could a young boy in love with Star Wars not want to see a movie like this? Special effects! Those two words echoed like a chant for me and every boy my age. The movie has special effects! My mother talked about the movie, but she stayed mostly quiet. It was Dad who said things like “This is ridiculous” and “We all know it’s not coming for twenty years more, because of Josiah’s vision.” I would say nothing, and he would say, “The movie’s bound to be wrong.” But he also couldn’t hide how excited he was. Taking my cereal box away from in front of me—I used to read every line of the ingredients list—he would eat dry Froot Loops with his hands, and said to the kitchen wall: “I wonder how much is actually based on scripture?”
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